‘The Adam Project’ Composer On ‘Perfect Scoring Process’ For Netflix’s Shawn Levy-Ryan Reynolds Adventure

Over a full year before Free Guy opened in theaters, Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy decided to partner back up for another sci-fi endeavor called The Adam Project. Flash forward two years later, and audiences can now stream the time travel title on Netflix.

A love letter to the iconic adventure films of the 1980s — ones Spielberg might have directed, produced, or influenced — the movie stars Reynolds as Adam Reed, a fighter pilot from the future who begrudgingly joins forces with his younger self (newcomer Walker Scobell) to track down future Adam’s missing wife, Laura (Zoe Saldana), and save the timeline from certain doom.

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Despite its more adrenaline-pumping elements, The Adam Project is really about family and premature loss. As the story gets underway, young Adam struggles with the recent death of his scientist father (Mark Ruffalo) and takes it out on his mother (Jennifer Garner), who tries to put on a strong face for the sake of her son.

When Adam’s adult self shows up with a jet capable of ripping wormholes through space-time, the boy and the man get a chance to spend one last day with their father, whose life’s work just so happens to result in the advent of time travel. Too bad dear old dad’s financial backer, Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener), has been using insider knowledge from her future self (à la Biff in Back to the Future Part II) to transform the world of tomorrow into a dystopian hellscape.

“It was really about healing the relationship between father and son and mother and son,” the movie’s composer, Rob Simonsen, tells me over Zoom. “There’s a lot of real heartfelt moments of hashing things out and children saying things to parents and parents saying things to kids that are wanted and needed and sometimes go unsaid. Sometimes, we lose people before we get a chance to say those things and there was a lot of action, lots of comedy, lots of laughs, but to me, the heart of it is what really drove the script and drove the score.”

The scoring process began with “a lot of experiments that were more abstract and electronic in nature” before Simonsen landed on “something that was piano-based and something simple and melodic.”

He continues: “To me, having these beds of ambience with simple piano melodies is something that I have just come back to in my work over and over. So it felt natural; it seemed to fit a futuristic vibe instead of just purely orchestral or pure piano sound. There’s a lot of effects going on with the piano and delays and different kinds of modulations. They’re subtle, but the idea is that it’s a little more a futuristic piano sound.”

Listen to the main theme below:

When Reynolds heard the above cue for the first time, he slid into Simonsen’s Instagram DMs to praise the work. “That was really reassuring,” the composer says. “When he reached out, he just said, ‘Thank you for seeing the film’ the way that he and Shawn saw it. Having him reach out and express that to me was really sweet.”

Levy — whose usual musical suspects include Christophe Beck and Alan Silvestri — had been looking for an opportunity to work with Simonsen after producing 2013’s The Spectacular Now.

“He called me up and was very excited and enthusiastic about this project and said that he had heard me do a lot of different things. Orchestral [stuff], dramatic stuff, and more sound design-oriented sci-fi stuff and action stuff,” Simonsen explains. “He wanted to give me a big canvas to pull it all together on.”

The composer was certainly no stranger to the project’s Spielbergian overtones, having crafted the soundtrack for Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which traded in a similar cinematic nostalgia.

“I think at that point, it was really in my DNA from my experience on Ghostbusters, just immersing myself for two years in films of the mid-80s,” Simonsen adds. “[Shawn and I] knew that we wanted the spirit of something that was a little Amblin-esque, but we also wanted it to be modern and feeling fresh.”

Levy has already proved his fondness for the ‘80s as an executive producer and director on Netflix’s breakout television hit, Stranger Things.

While it might have been easy for the director to ask for a carbon copy of that show’s musical beats (composed by Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon), Simonsen — who talks about the score as though it were a living, breathing entity — insists that the sonic landscape of Hawkins was never broached.

“I don’t think we thought it would be ‘80s Synthwave electronic or John Carpenter-esque, which is what Stranger Things is,” he says. “I think without it being said, we knew that this would require something different … Once we hit on orchestra, the film just really responded well to it. It just seemed to soak it up, so then we thought, ‘Ok, well that’s what it wants, so we’re just gonna give it that.’ There is a lot of synth in the score, but it mostly takes a backseat just to help give it a layer, to help keep it feeling futuristic and sci-fi.”

Simonsen recalls how seeing Free Guy in theaters last summer emboldened him to continue down the path he was already on. “We were in the middle of scoring at that point and I think it just helped me to crystallize what I was feeling about them and about the movie and about the script. That removed any confusion about what the feeling should be. In some ways, Free Guy has a similar tone: it’s optimistic and breezy and fun and funny, but there’s a lot of heart at the center of it.”

Rather than come up with a pair of separate themes for young Adam and old Adam, Simonsen came up with the idea of, “one theme would be the sound of Adam’s heart and the other one would be the sound of Adam’s heroism or the adventure side of it.”

In addition, he had to write around a number of licensed needle drops (The Spencer Davis Group’s “Gimme Some Lovin’,” Pete Townsend’s “Let My Love Open the Door,” and Boston’s “Long Time”), which add a light-hearted and almost Guardians of the Galaxy-esque vibe to the proceedings.

“We got to do some score lead-ins to those songs to help set them up. I love those songs and I think they work great in the film,” Simonsen admits. “It was really just about getting the timing of everything and the musical structure of it all ready, so that when the first note drops, it musically feels satisfying because it’s been kind of led up to in the right way. It was super fun.”

While a good portion of the scoring process took place in isolation against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, Simonsen did get to join Reynolds and Levy in person when it came time to put the final mix together.

“Most of them time that you hang out with Ryan … you’re constantly laughing,” he concludes. “So once we got together in person for the final mix, it was a lot of hard work and a lot of focus, but a lot of smiles and laughs between him and Shawn and Netflix and Skydance and all of the musicians that contributed [to it]. I think it was just a perfect scoring process.”

The Adam Project is now streaming on Netflix. Click here to read the Forbes review.